Brian Evenson - Last Days

With his remaining hand, he unwrapped his stump. Its extreme showed the dead circles from the burner, pus seeping through where he had burnt it too deeply, two lumps just below the elbow that must have been the sheared bones. He covered it up again.

The blood in his shoe had grown sticky, the outside of the shoe pasty with dust and blood. He could tell from the blood dripping down his face and onto his shoulder that his head was bleeding, but he was afraid to touch it. The only time he'd touched it, his fingers had gone in deeper than he'd thought possible.

He sat leaning against the tree, trying not to lie down. His hands felt like they were curling in on themselves and dying, even the hand that wasn't there.

After a while he managed to move his hand enough to fumble a sharp stone off the ground. He prodded the end of his stump with it. It made it feel like a knife was being pushed into his eye, but he felt almost alive again too. Yawing and drunken, he crashed up to his feet, lungs feeling like they were drawing in something other than air. He took a step and saw the ground flash toward him and then flash away, and then he was walking somehow, his vision such that he could only just distinguish between earth and sky. What had sounded like cars now sounded like rock scraping against rock, the pain slowly fading back to the same dull, shocked ache he had felt for hours now.

Gradually he made out the shape of the rise. He moved toward it and slowly started up. The sound warped, became more like cars again. He watched the ground in front of him and tried to lean toward it enough to keep moving forward, but not so far as to fall.

About halfway up, he thought he was going to fall backward and had to tack to one side. His feet kept trying to turn downslope; it was all he could do to keep crabbing uphill. His body felt like a separate animal. He could only watch it, encourage it on.

And then dust and scrub grass vanished, replaced by ash-gray gravel and, just beyond that, the asphalt of a two-lane road. Not a car to be seen in either direction. He took a step onto the gravel and then another step, and then collapsed.

When he awoke, he was screaming. He was not on a roadside, he was not on a hospital loading dock; he was in a bed, but not in the bed he had been in before, not the bed he had expected to be in.

"You're awake, then," said a blond man beside him who was missing his right hand.

It was a hospital bed, Kline saw, but he wasn't in a hospital. Instead, he appeared to be in a sort of old-fashioned drawing room: thick brocaded drapes, a grand piano, herringbone parquet floors.

On the wall directly across from him were two paintings which, despite gilt frames, seemed remarkably out of place. One was a simple portrait of a man's head, except the face had been gouged out to leave a pink, cone-shaped hole. The other, all grays and browns, showed a man wearing a leather helmet, leg amputated to the middle of his thigh. One arm was mostly missing, the other arm either partly missing or wrapped up and invisible. He was either blind or his eyes had rolled back into his head. He was either singing or screaming, Kline couldn't say which. Beside him lay a woman partly swallowed by a cloth bag, lying in a puddle of blood.

The blond man, he realized, was observing him closely, almost hungrily. Kline turned his head slightly to meet his gaze. The man didn't blink.

"Which do you prefer?" the man asked with a slight smile, gesturing at the paintings behind him.

"Does it matter?" asked Kline.

The man's face fell. "Of course it matters," he said.

"Is this a test?"

"Why would it be a test? It's just a simple question of taste."

"What if I say I like them both?"

"Do you like them both? Exactly the same?"

"What am I doing here exactly?" asked Kline. "What's all this about?"

"Where are my manners?" said the man. He reached out as if to lay his hand on Kline's remaining arm, instead touched Kline lightly with his stump. "You're with us," he said confidentially. "Trust me, you're safe here," he said.

"Who are you?"

"Call me Paul," said the man.

"Are you planning to kill me, Paul?"

"What a strange idea," said Paul.

"How long have I been here?"

Paul shrugged. "A few days," he said.

"Where's here?" asked Kline.

Paul smiled. "No need to worry about that now," he said.

"But," said Kline.

"No buts," said Paul, standing up now and moving toward the door. "You're still far from well. Lie back now. Try to sleep."

But he couldn't sleep. He lay in the bed, staring at the two paintings, the one on the left precise and clinical, the one on the right chiaroscuro and looking as though it had been done while the artist was channeling an insane Dutch master. The light coming through the window's panes slowly shifted, shuffling about the walls and then disappearing. The windows went slowly dark and opaque, the room lit by a single lamp to one side of him, near the wingchair in which Paul had been sitting. It was harder now to make the paintings out, the light from the lamp catching in the paint and beryling there, hiding the image behind.

In the half-light he began to grow anxious. He sat up slowly. His head ached but not as much as it had in the hospital. When he moved his shoulder, he still felt pressure in his eye, but nothing more. His legs were sore and worked only reluctantly, but after a moment he had edged his legs out of the bed and was standing.

Almost immediately, a blond man was beside him, touching his elbow lightly. He was not sure where the man had come from, certainly not through the door. From behind one of the curtains perhaps?

"You should rest," the blond man was saying in a soothing voice. "There's no need to get up." It was not the same man he had seen before, he realized, not Paul, although they looked similar. This man had a thicker face, was shorter.

"What do you want?" asked Kline.

"Is there something you need?" asked the man. "If you tell me what you need, I'll do my best to retrieve it for you."

"Where's Paul?" he asked.

"I'm Paul," the man said.

"Paul was the other one," said Kline. "You're not Paul."

"We're all Paul," the man said. He touched Kline lightly on the chest, nudged him until he sat on the bed. "Please," he said. "Please rest."

He let the second Paul coax him fully back into the bed, lifting up one of his legs and then the other, then dragging them over until he was lying again where he had been, in the half-light, staring at the vague shapes of the paintings. The Paul circled around behind his head and disappeared.

Getting out of the bed, even briefly, seemed to have exhausted him. Perhaps Paul, the second Paul, had been right.

In the morning he was awoken by a third blond man also missing his right hand. He came in through the door, a tray balanced precariously on his stump. He settled the tray on the bedside table, helped Kline to sit up, then moved the tray onto Kline's lap. Little silver vessels nestled fruits and a hardboiled egg and thick slices of bacon. There were toast points in each corner of the tray like a garnish and a glass of milk and a glass of orange juice.

Kline reached out and took the egg. He took a bite out of it, then looked into the chalky, cooked yolk. The blond man murmured approval.

"What is it?" asked Kline. Looking at him more closely, he could see that his hair wasn't naturally blond. It had been dyed.

"I was certain you'd take the egg first," said the man.

"You were?"

The man nodded, smiled.

"Is everything a test here?"

The man's smile fell. "I didn't mean to offend you," he said. "I would never presume to test you, friend Kline."